PwC has today launched a new Fintech capability called Vulcan Digital Asset Services to enable digital assets to be used for everyday banking, commerce and other personal currency and asset related services.

Vulcan’s services include digital asset wallets, international payment processing, and investment and trading services, and will soon offer point-of-sale and merchant services and the ability to create and support native digital currencies and rewards-based systems.

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Vulcan has had a lot of pre-launch attention. The platform is currently being piloted by an international banking group and a Central Bank, and being assessed by an airline and another three multinational banks.

Robert Allen, PwC Director and Vulcan Lead, said of the new PwC capability:

“Vulcan is a cloud-based platform that enables banks and corporates to offer a suite of new digital currency related products and services to individual, retail and institutional customers within a trusted, transparent and compliant ecosystem. It is the first of its kind globally and has been created to bring digital assets and currency to the mainstream.

“We’ve created Vulcan because at PwC we believe new technology supported by advances in cryptography and network computing – particularly Blockchain – will transform the consumer, government and financial market industries and shape the next generation of money.”

John Shipman, PwC’s Fintech Asia Leader said:

“Traditional financial services companies have taken a cautious approach to digital currencies because of the perceived issues with trust and transparency. Vulcan came about because we were looking at these issues in relation to Bitcoin – the poster child of digital money – and in particular, how we can solve challenges relating to the issues of anonymity, and existing regulatory requirements, and recourse given its cross-border nature, function as a store of value and lack of central control.

“Vulcan is a secure, transparent and regulatory compliant platform that takes care of these risks and technical challenges so banks and corporates can safely transition to this new market structure supported by distributed ledger technology.

“We’re already running several pilots within multiple industries looking at capturing digitised assets within our trusted wallets as well as issuing customer reward points as digital money. We’re also working with governments to see how these services can enhance transparency around humanitarian aid programs through the use of Smart (programmable) money,” Mr Shipman said.

“Blockchain-enabled business will be multi-network, multi-chain and multi-token,” said Jeff Garzik, CEO and co-founder of Bloq. “Companies exploring Blockchain technology need flexible, tailored systems. By partnering with Vulcan, we’re providing an avenue for even the largest of enterprises to be agile during this next wave of innovation.”

“Vulcan’s platform provides institutions with the ability to use Netki’s identity standard, to immediately comply with existing regulatory requirements. Netki provides the only open standards way to meet sanctions list and other risk and compliance needs around knowing your customer’s counterparty. By bringing together best of breed solutions around identity, reporting and security services, Vulcan enables the effective deployment of complete Blockchain-based applications and services.”

Founder and publisher of industry publication Blockchain News (EST 2015), a partner at ICO services collective Token.Agency ($750m+ and 90+ ICOs and STOs), director of education company Blockchain Partners (Oracle Partner) – Vancouver native Richard Kastelein is an award-winning publisher, innovation executive and entrepreneur. He sits on the advisory boards of some two dozen Blockchain startups and has written over 1500 articles on Blockchain technology and startups at Blockchain News and has also published pioneering articles on ICOs in Harvard Business Review and Venturebeat.Irish Tech News put him in the top 10 Token Architects in Europe.

Kastelein has an Ad Honorem - Honorary Ph.D. and is Chair Professor of Blockchain at China's first Blockchain University in Nanchang at the Jiangxi Ahead Institute of Software and Technology. In 2018 he was invited to and attended University of Oxford's Saïd Business School for Business Automation 4.0 programme. Over a half a decade experience judging and rewarding some 1000+ innovation projects as an EU expert for the European Commission's SME Instrument programme as a startup assessor and as a startup judge for the UK government's Innovate UK division.

He is a Canadian (Dutch/Irish/English/Métis) whose writing career has ranged from the Canadian Native Press (Arctic) to the Caribbean & Europe. He's written occasionally for Harvard Business Review, Wired, Venturebeat, The Guardian and Virgin.com, and his work and ideas have been translated into Dutch, Greek, Polish, German and French. A journalist by trade, an entrepreneur and adventurer at heart, Kastelein's professional career has ranged from political publishing to TV technology, boatbuilding to judging startups, skippering yachts to marketing and more as he's travelled for nearly 30 years as a Canadian expatriate living around the world. In his 20s, he sailed around the world on small yachts and wrote a series of travel articles called, 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Seas' travelling by hitching rides on yachts (1989) in major travel and yachting publications. He currently lives in Groningen, Netherlands where he's raising three teenage daughters with his wife and sailing partner, Wieke Beenen.

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